MAZEL TOV! New Yorkers can now vote in Yiddish

TIMES OF ISRAEL – The New York City Board of Elections has made voting registration forms available in Yiddish. The forms were available starting Monday, according to a statement by state Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat.

Hikind, who is Jewish, said he requested in December that the Board of Elections provide the forms in Yiddish.

“There are thousands of Yiddish speakers in my district and New York State,” Hikind said in the statement. “Everyone deserves the right to have their voice heard and be able to vote. Now Yiddish-speaking constituents can now register with ease.”

The Board of Elections is required to provide the document, which city residents must fill out in order to vote, in English, Bengali, Mandarin, Korean and Spanish, according to its website. It also provides forms in 11 additional languages, now including Yiddish.

In July, the city made voter registration forms available in five new languages in order to expand access to voting.

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If you can’t be bothered, if your language and historical identification are of such great importance to you that speaking your “mother tongue” and calling yourself a hyphenated-American trumps assimilating and conducting your affairs as an American in American English as a plain-old-American, go (back) to the place from whence you came or to the place where you identify.

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”

“This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.”

“But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.”

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English- Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian- Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.”

“The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.”

Theodore Roosevelt
Address to the Knights of Columbus
New York City- October 12th, 1915